Even in repeating stories, whence we can see no ill consequences to result, the giving one’s authors is regarded as a piece of indiscretion, if not of immorality. These stories, in passing from hand to hand and receiving all the usual variations, frequently come about to the persons concerned and produce animosities and quarrels among people whose intentions are the most innocent and inoffensive. To pry into secrets, to open or even read the letters of others, to play the spy upon their words and looks and actions—what habits more inconvenient in society? what habits, of consequence, more blameable? This principle is also the foundation of most of the laws of good manners, a kind of lesser morality calculated for the ease of company and conversation. Too much or too little ceremony are both blamed, and everything which promotes ease without an indecent familiarity is useful and laudable. Constancy in friendships, attachments, and intimacies is commonly very commendable, and is requisite to support trust and good correspondence in society. But in places of general though casual concourse, where the pursuit of health and pleasure brings people promiscuously together, public conveniency has dispensed with this maxim, and custom there promotes an unreserved conversation for the time by indulging the privilege of dropping afterwards every indifferent acquaintance without breach of civility or good manners. Even in societies which are established on principles the most immoral and the most destructive to the interests of the general society there are required certain rules which a species of false honour as well as private interest engages the members to observe. Robbers and pirates, it has often been remarked, could not maintain their pernicious confederacy did they not establish a new distributive justice among themselves and recall those laws of equity which they have violated with the rest of mankind. “I hate a drinking companion,” says the Greek proverb, “who never forgets.” The follies of the last debauch should be buried in eternal oblivion, in order to give full scope to the follies of the next. Among nations where an immoral gallantry, if covered with a thin veil of mystery, is in some degree authorized by custom, there immediately arise a set of rules calculated for the conveniency of that attachment. The famous court or parliament of love in Provence decided formerly all difficult cases of this nature.